Starting MySQL 4.1, MySQL had support for what is called derived tables, inline views or basically subselects in the from clause. In MySQL 5.0 support for views was added. These features are quite related to each other but how do they compare in terms of performance ?

Article about database design problems is being discussed by Kristian. Both article itself and responce cause mixed feellings so I decided it is worth commenting: 1. Using mysql_* functions directly This is probably bad but I do not like solutions proposed by original article ether. PEAR is slow as well as other complex conectors. I […]

One little known fact about MySQL Indexing, however very important for successfull MySQL Performance Optimization is understanding when exactly MySQL is going to use index and how it is going to do them. So if you have table people with KEY(age,zip) and you will run query something like SELECT name FROM people WHERE age BETWEEN […]

Jay Pipes continues cache experiements and has compared performance of MySQL Query Cache and File Cache. Jay uses Apache Benchmark to compare full full stack, cached or not which is realistic but could draw missleading picture as contribution of different components may be different depending on your unique applications. For example for application containing a […]

Recently Jay Pipes published great article about lazy connecting and caching which reminded me my post on this matter is well overdue. Let me start with couple of comments about Jays article. First – caching in files should be used with caution. It may be very efficient especially if number of cached objects is small […]

Baron wrote nice article comparing locking hints in MySQL and SQL Server. In MySQL/Innodb LOCK IN SHARE MODE and SELECT FOR UPDATE are more than hints. Behavior will be different from normal SELECT statements. Here is simple example:

If you care about archiving best performance in your application using MySQL you should learn about prepared statements. These do not neccesary provide performance beneft but they may, they also have other benefits. As a quick introduction – before MySQL 4.1 there were only textual statements and textual protocol for data transfer – query was […]

One nice feature added for EXPLAIN statement in MySQL 4.1 is EXTENDED keyword which provides you with some helpful additional information on query optimization. It should be used together with SHOW WARNINGS to get information about how query looks after transformation as well as what other notes optimizer may wish to tell us. It is […]

Running EXPLAIN for problematic queries is very powerful tool for MySQL Performance optimization. If you’ve been using this tool a lot you probably noticed it is not always provide adequate information. Here is list of things you may wish to watch out. EXPLAIN can be wrong – this does not happen very often but it […]